App-V 5 SP3 Rollout

So I finally tired of banging my head against SP2 needing a hotfix to work, and all the hassle of slipping it into a task sequence or waiting for it to be deployed to the client post build.

SP3 was the way forward.

I decided to rollout Windows Management Framework 4 first, as that was a dependency for the client. Initially I hit a wall of dependency errors which resulted in nothing happening. I tracked this down to a conflict between the Windows Management Framework v3, a requirement for App-V 5 SP2 and Windows Management Framework 4, a requirement for App-V 5 SP3.

Next I rolled out the App-V 5 SP3 client to my test bed. As expected and previously experienced with SP2, the uninstall of SP2 did not go smoothly. The PC simply rebooted, with no warning. Mind you, a little bit of investigation turned up this gem:

No, really. I do this for a living.

Someone forgot to include a /norestart option on the uninstall. I swift corrected that, however the SP2 client *still* insisted on an unannounced reboot. yet again I found myself having to work with SP2 and the option of only running the deployment when no user was logged on.

Okay, so now my test bed is all SP3’d. However I had no virtual applications! I went back to the monitoring node within Config Manager and looked at the SP3 deployment. It was again a dependency issue. All of our virtual apps have the client as a dependency, so where App_V 5 SP3 was deployed, it failed due to the dependency requirement for App-V 5 SP2 or SP1.

I went through all the virtual applications and updated their dependencies, removing SP1 and adding in SP3. I set SP3 to install if required, but gave SP2 the higher priority.

Any existing clients with SP2 will be left alone; that way I can control the rollout. Any PCs without SP2 will get the client, and at SP3.

I did find post deployment that there was an awful lag between the SP2 uninstall, SP3 install and redeployment of virtual apps. Some machines had absolutely no issues, some sat there for days with a list of virtual applications to install.